On and Off the Walls: Pieter Hugo’s Africa

Imagine a tall, blond man who could have been cast as Siegfried in Wagner’s opera walking through the streets of a Nigerian village with a camera. He draws immediate attention to himself, and must feel like an alien. In Pieter Hugo’s remarkable pictures of the hyena men—travelling Hausa performers with their animals—his subjects appear to be strange creatures, emissaries from the periphery of society. They create a spectacle in the places they visit.

I think Hugo’s ability to connect with these animal wranglers, initiated by their mutual strangeness and curiosity, allowed him to make these portraits as startling as they are. At first the pictures struck me as merely spectacular. Looking at them more carefully, they pulled me in and forced me to think about the relationships within each group, their animals, their surroundings, their daily lives, and, finally, African society in general.

Hugo is South African, and his subject is Africa. He started out as a photojournalist and with each project has pushed himself further into new territory. For another series, Hugo became fascinated by the gaudy world of the Nigerian movie industry, known as Nollywood. But instead of documenting what he saw, he decided to collaborate with Nigerian actors, models, and a makeup artist, using props, film sets, or natural settings to create a series of fictional portraits. The results are provocative, sometimes funny, sometimes shocking. In some cases, the actors incorporated post-colonial clichés into their own tableaus, thereby creating subversive self-representations with Hugo as the instigator and documentarian. This, to me, is what makes these pictures so remarkable.